Simon Goldhill: Ritual, Epiphany & Disruption
Advanced studies’ seminar on sacred space hosted by Eric Parry Architects, 14 December 2021. With Professor Simon Goldhill (University of Cambridge), “Ritual, Epiphany & Disruption”.
This paper will discuss the relationship between ritual and epiphany as models of habitus and disruption. How much is the perception of beauty in architecture dependent on permanence, continuity, order, how much on surprise, revelation, strangeness? It will build on the literary background to art history (ancient Greek, Christian, Ruskin, Pater) to consider the tension between waiting and the moment as frameworks of presence.
Simon Goldhill is Professor in Greek Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of Preposterous Poetics (2020), The Buried Life of Things (2014), Jerusalem: City of Longing (2009), The Temple of Jerusalem (2008) and the editor of Being Urban (2020) among many other books and articles. In Cambridge, he directed the ERC-funded project The Bible and Antiquity in 19th-Century Culture and currently is director of the Mellon funded project Religious Diversity and the Secular University.
